If you’re not a fan of Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, then LaGuardia Airport really has nothing to offer you. Besides travel-friendly food options like “jalapeño and cheese pretzel dogs” the aging, dirty, sometimes-leaking airport is by all accounts a disaster. Just ask Vice President Joe Biden who once said that if he blindfolded someone and took them to LaGuardia they would think they were in “some third world country.” The Vice President adding, “I’m not joking.”

A proposal for a dense forest along the Rockaways shoreline in New York City could boost storm resiliency in the area. Local Office Landscape and Urban Design, led by Walter Meyer and Jennifer Bolstad, has proposed the forest along the Robert Moses roadway in Rockaway, Queens. The so-called “Rockaway East Resiliency Preserve” would turn the storm-weary Rockaways into a blooming, natural location.

The City of New Rochelle, New York, is announcing the start of an exciting new competition to re-imagine its waterfront and downtown communities. Founded in 1688 by a craftsman from La Rochelle, France, New Rochelle, sits on the shore of Long Island Sound just a few miles north of New York City. A diverse, highly livable, and walkable place, the city has made great strides in recent years to rehabilitate its infrastructure and historic downtown.

However, there is only a single block in the commercial quarter that touches on the shore of Long Island Sound. This is the site of the competition. In order to take advantage of this valuable waterfront, the city is sponsoring the three-part Waterfront Gateway Design Competition, which will officially launch tomorrow, Thursday at noon.

Land’s Literal End. A sprawling 25-room colonial mansion called Land’s End on Long Island’s North Shore has been torn down. Gothamist and Curbed link to a CBS video of the destruction of the house said to have inspired the decadence of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Fortress in Disguise.Shortlist found a house that can transform itself from a windowless cube of a fortress into a modern luxury mansion with the press of a button. The appropriately named Safe House was designed by KWK Promes architecture

Treme Teardown. Preservationists in New Orleans are pushing to save the 1950s-era Phillis Wheatley elementary school designed by Charles Colbert from the wrecking ball. The Times Picayune reports that Tulane architects and a Treme actress are leading the call.

The Urban 30. We’re tickled to be named in OCU’s list of 30 Best Blogs for Urban Planning Students!

Renewal 2.0. The NY Times ran a recent story about the proposed rebuilding of Quincy, Mass. The public-private partnership would tear town most of the city’s urban core and start over again with a massive roughly $1.5 billion project to create a new downtown. While the article doesn’t articulate what would be lost, it does speculate on the size of the real estate gamble if the project falls through.

It’s official. The suburbs are here to stay. Now we just need to figure out what to do with them. At least that’s the premise of the Build A Better Burb competition that we told you about back in July, when entries submitted by architects, urban designers, planners, visionaries and students, all vying for $22,500 in prizes, were slimmed down to 23 finalists.

Moving day for the Lieb House, en route to a Long Island-bound barge. (Akira Sawa)

The Lieb House, Robert Venturi’s second commission and once in danger of demolition, will soon be en route to its new location, but by sea, not by land. After a bit of resistance from Glen Cove town council, the house has been cleared to travel by barge to its new site in the Long Island town.Read More